Deane Keller

Portrait Painter, Teacher

Deane Keller, a Hamden portrait artist who taught at Yale University for more than 40 years, died Sunday at the Whitney Center in Hamden. He was 90.

The New Haven native taught drawing and painting at the Yale School of Fine Arts from 1929 to 1970.

His work included portraits of prominent people, including Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, whose portrait is on display in the Senate reception chamber at the Capitol in Washington. Mr. Keller's subjects included Raymond E. Baldwin and P.B. O'Sullivan, chief justices of the state Supreme Court; Gov. John Lodge; and Chauncey B. Tinker, one of Yale's most famous scholars.

Mr. Keller was a graduate of Yale. In 1927, he won the American Prix de Rome and was a resident fellow at the American Academy in Rome for three years.

From 1943 to 1946, he served as a fine arts officer in the Fifth Army in Italy, responsible for the identification and transport of artworks in Tuscany